11. “Even people who know nothing of Caesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler, who is in some sense uniquely supreme or paramount -- the meaning of Kaiser in German, Tsar the Slavonic languages, and quysar in the Islamic world.”
I can relate to that quote because I even started the research of Julius Caesar, or knew anything about him, I related the name to supremity. I thought of the name as almost being one of the gods during the ancient greek times. It was not until I started this unit that I realized that Caesar was a lot less powerful and unloved than history had made him out to be. Caesar won many military battles, and during his time took over much of Gale. Throughout those battles he kept up journals of what went on, but the journals also contained the bias. His writings reflected himself as a glorious military leader, as well as human being, and we come up with the reoccuring problem in history that you usually only see the winning sides point of view. The writings along with the high opinion of Caesar by the common people, could have caused the name Caesar to universally mean supreme and paramount.
Juilus Caesar had all this power and was well know, but the play that was named after him, does not have him playing a large role. Before I started the play I thought it would be biographical of his life, but instead it showed his downfall from the Roman thrown. Shakespeare took an interesting approach to Caesar, because instead of glorifying him like history had done for many years, he showed the world the tragic flaw that the great man processed. Shakespeare tried to take the meaning of supreme and paramount out of Caesar’s name, and show that the man was indeed a man, not a god.